Foreign affairs

Foreign affairs

Saturday 1 July 2006 18.54 EDT
First published on Saturday 1 July 2006 18.54 EDT

"I pleaded with her not to," wrote Nicholas Shakespeare in the Daily Telegraph, recalling the time when Martha Gellhorn burnt some of her most private letters. "For this reason, I started The Letters of Martha Gellhorn anxious in case her bonfire had consumed the best material. I needn't have worried ... these letters, impeccably edited by Caroline Moorehead, present a richer, livelier and more honest self-portrait than anything Gellhorn might have hazarded herself." "They cover a long and very active life, lived at full speed," said Claire Harman in the Sunday Telegraph. "They are real letters, full of energy, excitement and immediacy ... Moorehead remarks that Gellhorn's generation may have been the last in which letter- writing was 'a natural part of life'. The reflection adds poignancy to the passing of such a fine woman and writer, but this terrific new book brings her voice back in all its power and individuality." "The overall impression of this beguiling volume is of someone talking to - rebuking - herself: self-hortatory, never satisfied, always striving," wrote Kate McLoughlin in the Times Literary Supplement. "Reading it is uplifting, if exhausting, because it redoubles the desire to live the full life, too."

"Mingling fact with fiction, Edgardo Cozarinsky's The Moldavian Pimp atmospherically recreates the white slave traffic of Buenos Aires in the 1920s," explained Ian Thomson in the Sunday Telegraph. The Argentine filmmaker's first novel "teems with brilliantined tango impresarios and Jewish mobsters and their molls." However, "to what extent Cozarinsky has fictionalised elements of an actual sex trafficking case is unclear. Transposing life and fiction is his forté as a writer." "I found this irritating at the start," admitted Miranda France in the Daily Telegraph. "Whereas Latin American novelists regularly blur the line between fact and fiction, the British reader is more determined to know what's what. But Cozarinsky's twilight world became increasingly beguiling as I read on."

"It is impossible to pick up a new biography of Alan Turing without a sinking of the heart," sighed Nigel Hawkes in the Times, picking up David Leavitt's new biography of Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much. "His life has become a playpen for gay writers with a point to make: Turing seen through pink-coloured spectacles. One begs for a roistering heterosexual to take an interest in the poor man, reduced as he has become to the role of a case history in the long battle for gay rights. But this is not that book. Leavitt nails his colours to the mast early, identifying Turing's defence of machine intelligence as a subtle critique of the repression of homosexuals in the intolerant England of the 1950s. If machines can think, men can sleep with each other, is the message Turing was trying to put over, evidently. It seems unlikely."